Calgary: How a Mounted Police Post Became Canada's Cow Town

Why is Calgary called Cow Town?

Calgary earned the nickname because, for a few decades, cattle were the business that mattered. The city became the main shipping centre for cattle on the Canadian prairies, with stockyards, slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants growing up beside the railway. Ranchers from the foothills west and south of town sent their steers here, and the name stuck long after oil replaced beef as the city's headline industry.

The story starts well before the stockyards. The North-West Mounted Police built a post at the meeting of the Bow and Elbow rivers in 1875, first called Fort Brisebois and officially renamed Fort Calgary in 1876. Its main job was to stop the illegal whiskey trade. Cattle came next.

From Fort Calgary to Treaty 7

Ranching could not start until the land was opened. Treaty 7 was signed in 1877, and it cleared the way for the government to allocate land, including a right of way for the railway. Local heritage writers note that the Siksika opposed a railway survey through Blackfoot Crossing, and that Father Lacombe, who had relationships with Indigenous leaders, helped keep the survey from turning into open conflict.

The buffalo that had fed the plains nations effectively vanished from the prairies by 1884, the same year Calgary was incorporated as a town. Those two facts sit side by side in the record: the end of the buffalo economy and the start of the cattle economy happened within a few years of each other on the same grass.

How ranching came to the Calgary foothills

Senator Matthew H. Cochrane is credited by the Calgary Heritage Initiative with founding the first large-scale ranch in Alberta. He had helped shape how the Crown would grant prairie grazing rights, and in 1881 James Walker became operations manager of the Cochrane ranch. Walker drove cattle up from Montana, and the herd suffered from starvation and an unusually cold winter, an early lesson in how hard Alberta winters could be on stock.

Money followed from Britain. Wealthy British investors funded large ranches including the Oxley, the Walrond and the Bar U, and the railway's access to distant markets made the investments look sound. Former Mounted Police officers took end-of-term land grants and went into the trade too. One estimate puts 25,000 head of cattle between the Bow River and the U.S. border in 1884, and The Canadian Encyclopedia reports about 100,000 cattle grazing on leased pasture east of the Rockies by 1886.

Pat Burns and the ranches around the city

Heritage Calgary calls roughly 1886 to 1906 the golden age of ranching around the city, and its ranch-house survey shows who was operating. Pat Burns, born in Ontario, came to Alberta in 1890 and by 1912 owned six large ranches, earning the title Cattle King of the northwest. He bought the Bow Valley site in 1902 and the Ricardo Ranch in 1906. William Crawley Ricardo had established that ranch in 1886, and the Burns family held it until 1948 apart from a gap from 1925 to 1929.

Smaller operators mattered as well. The Nimmons 3-D Bar Ranch started in the mid-1880s, buying land at $8 an acre. The Copithorne brothers set up near Jumping Pound Creek in 1887, on a site that is now the CL Ranch. John Ware, a former enslaved man who arrived in Alberta in 1882, helped bring 3,000 head to Sir Hugh Allan's North-West Cattle Company and later built his own large herd near Duchess.

The Calgary Stampede and the cowboy brand

In 1912 Guy Weadick, a veteran of American Wild West shows, organized the first Calgary Stampede. It was a 10-day rodeo festival in July, and it has been held every year since 1923. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes it today as the richest rodeo by total prize money, drawing more than a million visitors annually. Calgary's boots-and-hats image is the direct descendant of that event, and it is one reason the city still markets itself as Cow Town. For more on rodeo culture, see the rodeo coverage at farm.FM.

Costs and limits of the ranching boom

The open range did not last. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes that in the early 1900s the prairie was surveyed and sold, and the large seasonal roundups ended. The land itself had been opened through a treaty process that came with grievances, and the end of the buffalo took away a food source that the plains nations had depended on.

Weather was another limit. Early herds such as Cochrane's showed the risk: the Montana cattle that Walker drove north suffered starvation and an unusually cold winter.

From cattle to oil, and where to learn more

Natural gas was found at Turner Valley in 1914, Alberta's first refinery opened in 1923, and crude oil followed from the same field in 1936. After the 1947 Leduc discovery near Edmonton, Calgary became the business centre of the Canadian petroleum industry, but the cattle heritage survived in the Stampede and in working ranches on the city's edge. Visitors can read about the city's start in the Britannica entry on Calgary and about the cattle era in the Calgary Heritage Initiative's Cow Town article. Ranch houses are catalogued by Heritage Calgary, and The Canadian Encyclopedia covers the wider story of Canadian cowboys. A related farm.FM story about Calgary and Alberta ranching is also worth a look.